How Not To Treat Your Customers

Every so often, I’m prompted to write a diatribe about some experience I’ve had. In this post, I thought I’d relate some bad customer service experiences I’ve recently had.

I’m an older dude who still plays video games.

I was there when Pong, the original tennis game made an appearance. And I’m still playing games several decades later. I’m in my 50s, btw, not some geriatric button masher. Not yet, anyway.

Video games aren’t just the preserve of the young!

I also like the Zombie genre. I bought a game called State of Decay back in 2014 which is a game that tests your survival skills following the Zombie Apocalypse.

This year, the long awaited sequel – the imaginatively entitled State of Decay 2 – was released.

Now, I usually buy my games from the likes of Steam (or games vendors that sell Steam keys). In case you don’t know what Steam is, it’s a games portal where you download games after you buy a game access code. They also keep games updated on your PC for you automatically.

State of Decay 2 isn’t available on Steam.

The original game studio that developed State of Decay was bought out by Microsoft, so State of Decay 2 is a Microsoft title.

So I bought my game and a DLC (DownLoadable Content – an addon for the game) from CDKeys – a discount games store – and got a receipt by email that included download links. There was no mention of game keys.

In my innocence, I assumed that these download links were to download the game and the addon to my PC.

No, they were links to the game keys for the game and DLC.

But nowhere on those game key pages were there any instructions on where to download the actual game and its addon.

I contacted CDKeys support and asked where I could download the game.

Maybe English wasn’t their first language, because all they did was tell me where to get the game keys again.

So I sent a dumbed-down version of my request again.

Meanwhile, I decided to hunt around online for any clue as to where you can get your game downloads.

It took a while before I found the golden nugget of information that these games need to be downloaded from the Microsoft Store.

And where’s that online?

Bad Customer Service #2 – Forcing Your Customer To Do Something They May Not Want To

Turns out there’s a link to it in your Start Menu – but only if you’re running Windows 10. And it must be the Anniversary Edition of Windows 10.

It just so happens that my games PC does run Windows 10 (a horrible operating system in my opinion). Back in April there was an enforced upgrade of Windows 10 issued by Microsoft.

That’s right. Microsoft forced a Windows upgrade on its customers without seeking their express permission to do so. I’m not sure if that actually breaks EU law.

After that update – which I think upgraded Windows 10 to the Anniversary Edition – I could no longer create folders on my external drive. I could copy files to and from the disk. I just wasn’t allowed to create any new folders.

By the way, I can get Windows 10 to crash on demand – getting the (light) blue screen of death – just by plugging in another external hard drive after I log in. This has always happened so it’s not an issue confined to the recent update.

A friend of mine’s email client was scrambled following the enforced update. There are other sad stories of people having their systems messed up by the update.

Anyway, back to the game.

Bad Customer Service #3 – Making Your Customer Jump Through Unnecessary Hoops And Making Them use A Broken User Interface

I opened the Microsoft Store since I finally knew where to find it.

“You need a Microsoft account to access the store“, I was told. “Use your Skype, All-in-one ID or other Microsoft credentials to log in”.

I have a Skype account, so I logged in with it.

I typed “State of Decay 2” into the search box.

“Your account is invalid!”

What do you mean it’s invalid? I’ve just logged in!

“Please create a new account!”

So I had to log out, faff about creating a whole new account and log into it.

I searched for “State of Decay 2” again.

“Your account is invalid!”

For f**k’s sake, no it’s not!

“You seem to have more than two accounts. Only one per customer is permitted.”

But you just told me to create a new account!

“This issue can be automatically fixed. Click the Fix button.”

If it can be fixed automatically, then why not fix it automatically? Don’t waste my time telling me I have to click a button that I have to click in order to get any further with your crappy system!

“Your accounts have been consolidated.”

At this point, something other than an error appeared when I searched for “State of Decay 2“…

The game sales page appeared asking me to buy it. Looking at the page there was a “…” option. Clicking that brought up a menu where one of the options was “Redeem Game Code“.

Finally, I was getting somewhere.

I entered the game key and the game actually downloaded.

Ok, now to download the DLC.

I typed in the DLC name and got a “no such product” type message.

What??

How do I get my DLC??

I returned to the “State of Decay 2” sales page and clicked the “…” button to see if I could use the “Redeem Game Code” option again.

Nope.

That option was now missing from the menu.

Why?

Because I’d already redeemed a code for that game. Why would I need to redeem it again?

The system accepted the key and then…the menu closed and…nothing happened.

Had the key been accepted? Had it actually gone through?

I clicked “…” again but the “Redeem Game Code” option was gone.

So where was my DLC?

I don’t know how, but when I loaded and ran the game, the DLC was listed as having been installed.

So it all worked out in the end.

Apart from the 2 hours I spent trying to find where to download the damn thing and actually install it.

This is a lesson in how not to treat your customers.

A Customer-Hostile Experience

It feels like Microsoft hates its customers and has gone out of its way to put as many obstacles in a customer’s way as possible.

It’s lead to an absolutely lousy customer experience – so bad in fact that I don’t ever see myself buying another game that’s provided through their buggy, user-hostile Store.

And now that you’ve read this whinge, you’ll probably feel the same way too.

You may not be a gamer but you’ll probably take from this post that Microsoft customer support sucks big-time.

That’s the power of word-of-mouth. Bad word-of-mouth.

And over coffee in the office tomorrow you might regale your colleagues with this story you came across about how bad Microsoft serves its customers.

So, more bad press for Microsoft.

And you add that to the variety of stories of bugs and weird behaviour in Windows 10 following the enforced update, it’s no wonder that I’ve heard a lot of people saying they’ve had it with Microsoft and they’re moving to Linux or a Mac.

The combined experiences here could potentially lead to the downfall of Microsoft. It won’t happen overnight. But there could be a sizable migration of users away from the platform to other operating systems in the coming years.

All because of bad customer service.

This is also an example of one stupendous own-goal.

If you have customers yourself, plan to or even if you only have subscribers to a newsletter, treat them with respect. Treat them the way you’d want to be treated and valued.

It can take years to build a reputation only to see it destroyed in an instant because you show your customers and subscribers that you don’t care how they experience your brand.

Don’t be that guy or gal!

Epilogue

After sending a couple of additional emails to CDKeys about where I could download the game I ordered from them, somebody knowledgeable finally responded and explained the process of accessing the game download.

It’s just a pity that they don’t include this information with their game keys (at least where Microsoft games are concerned). It’s a bad mistake to assume customers will be intimately acquainted with the game portal in question. And every one of them does things differently.

While CDKeys failed to provide enough information, Microsoft are the real culprits here in providing bad customer service. There’s really no excuse for it. A company with the monetary resources it has access to should have the slicked, most customer-friendly portal around.

It just feels like they’ve been penny-pinching and it’s come back to bit them on the ass!

If you’ve a bad customer service story you’d like to share or how a bad experience changed your view of a company or seller, please have your say in the comments below…

4 thoughts on “How Not To Treat Your Customers”

Gary, I read you loud and clear. And bad service online is the most frustrating as you can’t look the originator in the eye and let them (verbally) know what you think until you get the right answer.

I am not a gamer but my very good friend is. He plays the ones where the players are from many countries. Now with the new upgrades, they might be in the middle of intense games and, hey presto, Google butts in and game over. Nothing has been saved. (Not even sure how games are saved but I assume saves are made at times!)

I also get frustrated over the simple computer instructions such as ‘delete’, ‘are you sure you want to delete’, ‘of course I am or I wouldn’t have pushed delete in the first place’, ‘well just to be really sure think again and then push delete to confirm this’.

A bit long winded but you get my drift.

A university friend of mine had finished some online work and saved it. He wanted to then log out. The save message came up so he saved again. And it kept coming up. As he had the information elsewhere he finally clicked on don’t save. And the whole system shut down.

You just can’t believe computers!

The one really main advantage we have with face to face bad service is that we can find alternative sources of what we want. Online that is often very hard to do.

Hi Helen. I think some online companies choose to offer poor customer support because it saves them money. It’s one thing when an irate customer gets up in your face when dealing with them personally but with online support, companies can keep them at a distance so they don’t have to empathise with their situation.

Google are guilty of this as much as anyone. You’d think that one of the biggest companies in the world would go out of their way to keep in the good graces of their customers and users. That used to be the case when you could engage in a one-to-one email exchange with a Google employee. Now Google don’t engage directly with users any more. They’ve become complacent.

It seems the bigger a company gets, the more complacent it gets towards its customers and users. Why worry about one person’s problems when there are millions of others happy with your goods?

But I’ve seen appalling support from individual developers as well as big companies. There’s a tendency with all of them to resort to victim blaming. “You’ve done something wrong”. “You’re not using the product as your supposed to”, etc. instead of them owning up to the fact that they screwed up somewhere.

I like your style of presenting your dilemma with Microsoft! I can understand how it can be frustrating when you don’t “get” the way they have designed the Windows 10 upgrade – it does take a “learning curve” and requires one to actually “switch” your way of thinking!
It’s like the first time I used an android phone after using iphone – it took me a while to get my mind “switched” to the way it was designed!
I think that Microsoft is trying to compete with Apple for its security protection – but for so much security it has become a terrible headache of a maze to figure out where is what and how to get “access” to what ever you are looking for! aaaargh…the “wonders” of technology!
Enjoyable read though 😉

Hi Orion. I was a professional programmer for 20 years. I was very good at it before I walked away to build an online business.

In my time, I developed a large number of user interfaces that were the public facing aspects of the underlying software. A design principle is to make the interface intuitive to to use and not block potions of the screen unnecessarily. Present information in an easy to read, appealing fashion.

Today, that ethic appears to have been tossed aside. I find a lot of user interfaces to be very badly designed, very unintuitive and, in the worst cases, downright user hostile.

Windows 10 may be a good operating system under the hood. But its user interface is woeful (my opinion). I can never find what I’m looking for unless I put a shortcut to it on the desktop. It routinely crashes when I plug in my external hard drive. I could on on with the operational problems I have with it.

On the basis of my experience with it on my games PC, I’ve outright refused to install it on my work PC.

Microsoft Word is another example of a woeful user interface. Things that should be grouped on one tab are instead spread across several tabs.

In the good old days, if a you couldn’t use a menu option, it stayed in the menu but was greyed out. These days, if you can’t remove a menu option, it completely disappears from the menu. So you know at some point you used a feature before and you want to use it again, and you spend ages trying to hunt it down. But, of course, you can’t find it because it’s been temporarily removed from the menu until such time as some condition arises where it’s added back into the menu.

User hostile.

I think a lot of the user interface issues on desktop PCs are due to the interfaces designed for mobile apps. These are only intuitive when you’re familiar with how the apps work. Which is to say they’re not intuitive at all. An intuitive interface means anyone can use it without needing training to do so.

Interfaces should be designed for users, not the other way round. Microsoft are guilty of the latter now where many of their products and services are concerned.

If I were in my former Project Manager role, I’d have nixed these interfaces in the bud. They’re that bad.

A bad customer experience leads to lost revenue for a company. it seems that the top executives in Microsoft (and in other companies) have lost touch with the end users and what they want from products and instead they want to foist their ideas on their customers.

Apple do this successfully. People buy into the brand as much as the products. But since the death of Steve Jobs, Apple have come adrift. They haven’t released anything groundbreaking since Jobs died. All they’re doing is releasing iterations of existing products. The visionary has gone and so has heart of the company.